


Do Something Good

by lunaficsforbadflics (lalunaunita)



Series: Spies of Salvation [1]
Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator: Salvation
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Fics center around Marcus and Blair, Friendship/Love, Gen, One-shot sequels to Terminator: Salvation, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22558003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalunaunita/pseuds/lunaficsforbadflics
Summary: After the events of Terminator: Salvation, Marcus awakens to discover that he's still not dead. He intends to quit the Resistance, but Blair isn't ready to let him go. The pair embark on a new adventure together.See the end for a summary of all 4 Terminator movies up to this point, since I know there's several alternate timelines, etc.
Relationships: Marcus Wright & Blair Williams
Series: Spies of Salvation [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623079
Comments: 7
Kudos: 3





	Do Something Good

When Marcus woke, there was no pain. He smiled, eyes closed against a bright light. _Heaven._ No. No, that wasn’t right. If there were a life after death, he wasn’t slated for paradise. His brow furrowed as dark shapes coalesced in the bright field that bled in through his eyelids. He blinked, then groaned as a room took shape around him.

A woman jumped back, startled. Marcus squinted as the light she’d been blocking flooded back into his face. He could see several figures around him, but couldn’t make out their faces. None of them came forward. He held up a hand to shade his eyes.

“Why,” he croaked, then swallowed, tongue feeling strangely thick. He tried again. “Why am I alive?”

His question was met with silence. Finally a lithe figure, blurry at the edges, came to his side and clutched his sleeve. She seemed loathe to break the silence, and at first Marcus couldn’t make out her whispered words. Or at least he thought she was whispering. Maybe his ears weren’t working right.

“...thought it was for the best. Because there’s never been one like you. John said we shouldn’t give up any asset that can help us win the war against Skynet.” The woman’s voice had grown louder— or his hearing had grown sharper— but she dropped back to a whisper. “I told them they should let you go. You’ve done enough. I’m sorry they didn’t respect your wishes.”

Marcus groggily cocked his head to one side and looked up at her. “Blair.” 

He could see alarm in Blair’s eyes as her gaze flicked over to the other woman, a red-head whose name he couldn’t remember.

The red-head smiled gently. He found it disconcerting.

“This is normal. At least, it’s what I expected, so I hope it’s normal. His human parts are still eliminating the drugs from his system and his machine parts are… booting up, I guess. Give him time.” The red-head pushed away the bright light overhead and leaned in again with a pen-light. She lifted Marcus’s eyelids and shone it into the pupils.

“Yeah, just give him time,” she reiterated with a nod.

“Okay,” Blair agreed, crumpling the fabric of Marcus’s sleeve in her fist.

“Where did they all go?” he asked, looking down beyond his legs and feet.

The red-head stared at him curiously. “Who?”

“All the people…” he trailed off as he caught sight of metal fingers pointing to the end of the bed.

He drew the fingers up to his face and looked at them closely, turning the hand they were attached to this way and that. Did they belong to him? They blurred and twisted in his vision as his eyes crossed.

“I’m tired,” Marcus sighed as he drifted into darkness.

* * *

The room - if you could call it that - was dark when Marcus next awoke. This time he felt alert, energetic. His eyes shifted back and forth, taking in the details of his surroundings. He was enclosed by four squares of translucent plastic sheeting attached to a metal framework. He could make out the movement of bodies in the light beyond his small, secluded space. He was in an actual hospital bed. It surprised him. It was hard to fathom what kinds of resources, preserved for fifteen years after Judgement Day, would occasionally appear looking out of place in the desolate junk heaps humans now fashioned into places of safety.

He heard quiet breathing next to him and saw Blair, sitting upright but asleep, in a chair nearby.

“Blair,” he whispered.

She started and woke instantly, hands clutching the metal arms of her chair. “Wh-what? Oh, Marcus. You’re awake. Let me get Kate.”

He reached out to stop her, but stared anew at his own metal left hand instead. The rest of his memories slammed into place. The force of them threw him back against the bed, his arm over his eyes to shield him from images he couldn’t escape. 

“Marcus?” Blair asked, alarm bleeding into her voice.

“It’s fine, it’s just… a lot. Didn’t I donate my heart to John Connor? What the hell is going on?”

Blair moved to his side and took his good hand between her own. He searched her face for answers. Hesitant, she squeezed his fingers.

“You’re too...valuable. You’re a Terminator,” she raised her voice to quell his protests, “who is also a human. They couldn’t let you die.” 

Marcus gripped her fingers within his own inhuman ones - tight. He saw her wince, but she didn’t pull away.

“They don’t know what I am. Neither do you,” he whispered hoarsely, and let her go.

“I’m getting Kate,” Blair repeated.

Marcus closed his eyes and didn’t answer. He listened to the whisk of plastic sheeting as she left and the quiet conversations that seeped in through the cracks. He felt simultaneously that he could walk for days on end, or fall asleep at any moment. It made him uneasy, antsy. He shifted around in the hospital bed, pushed himself up to sitting against his pillows— another luxury apparently reserved for the sick and wounded. He dragged his fingers down the cotton pillowcases, marveling at their softness. They were better spent on children and old people, humans who needed a bit of comfort in this unyielding hellscape.

His ears honed in on the sound of Kate and Blair returning like a radio tuning in to a clear signal.

“He’s awake? He knows where he is?”

“Yes. He’s not exactly happy about it. I told you he wouldn’t be.”

“I know you did, but we have to look at the bigger picture. John’s calling the shots now that Headquarters was destr—”

“John wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for Marcus,” Blair hissed as Kate drew back the plastic curtain and stepped in, prominent late-pregnancy belly preceding her.

Marcus saw Kate give Blair a side-long glance and the other woman clamped her mouth shut. She still wore a defiant frown. Marcus got the impression they’d had this argument before.

Kate turned to Marcus and gave him her full attention. “Hi, Marcus.”

“Hi.”

Her smile was false, the kind Marcus remembered from many a doctor visit in his childhood. She clasped her hands under her tummy. “How are you feeling?”

“Not dead.”

“No, not by a long shot.”

“What did you do to me, Kate?” Marcus leaned as far forward as the bed would allow, refusing to let her look away.

“The short answer is we caught a machine, and we transplanted its power source into you. Got you running again.” The smile stayed in place and Marcus kept staring, determined that she would break first.

Then he cheated.

“ _What_ the absolute _fuck_ , Kate?!” he roared.

She flinched and he was satisfied. Then he noticed anew her small, pregnant frame and felt like an asshole. Was he to be of two minds about everything in this new world?

Booted feet stamped against the concrete outside and two more people pushed their way in. Marcus rolled his eyes. Of course the cavalry came running for John Connor’s precious wife. One face twisted upward in a disbelieving grin, and only then did Marcus recognize Kyle Reese. His irritation ebbed and he felt a smile of his own part his lips.

“Marcus! Yes! It worked!” Kyle laughed, coming around to hug him.

Marcus patted Kyle’s back with his good hand.

“Hey, Kyle, how you been?” he asked.

Marcus pretended not to notice Kate slipping away as Kyle enthusiastically filled him in on life as a Resistance soldier. The second man glared suspiciously, but left with Kate. Blair stood stubbornly at the foot of the bed. Marcus listened as Kyle talked on and watched Blair fiddle with the blanket edge near his foot. 

“Kyle,” Marcus interrupted, just as Kyle was giving him a run down of his new responsibilities.

“What’s up?”

“Sorry, man, I have to be honest. Everything you’re saying is just running together into a long string of words. I think I’m still waking up.” Marcus tried his best to look apologetic.

“Oh! Yeah, sorry. Forgot you’d still be tired. Come find me when they let you out of here, okay? I have some stuff you could help me with. See ya, Marcus.” Kyle grinned sheepishly and scratched his neck, then backed out of the makeshift room.

Marcus caught Blair’s eye, then looked back at her fidgeting fingers. “Something on your mind?”

“I— no, everything’s fine, Marcus. You’re fine. You just rest. I’ll come check on you in a few hours.” Blair whirled abruptly and left, leaving Marcus puzzling over their odd interaction. He didn’t dwell on it too long, however. Sleep claimed him again.

* * *

If Kate Connor’s frequent drop-ins annoyed Marcus, it was nothing compared to when John Connor finally caught up to him. Connor stood, still leaning on a cane after his recent surgery, and watched as Marcus helped Kyle strip old cars for usable parts. He finally approached and greeted Kyle with a warm handshake. The beatific smile Kyle gave John in response pissed Marcus off. He scowled until it was his turn to grab the man’s hand, but resisted the urge to crush John’s fingers in his grip.

Connor had nearly half of what made Marcus human. At the time, Marcus knew the trade had been right - his second chance to do something good with his waste of a life. Now he was back and almost all machine - excepting brain, skin, and a little blood and muscle. He missed his heart.

“You’re wearing a glove,” John commented, indicating Marcus’s ruined left hand.

“Yeah, Kate said there’s a chance the skin might grow back, so she wants me to keep it covered. Apparently Skynet did a little genetic modification on me, but she doesn’t know exactly what for.” Marcus’s tolerance for small talk vanished. “What do you want, John?”

The pretense of camaraderie fell away from John like a mask. 

“I have a mission for you,” he said, too low for Kyle to hear.

Marcus’s scowl dropped back into place as he listened to the so-called leader of the Resistance. He didn’t like what he heard.

* * *

Marcus gave a wave of thanks as a gate guard rolled back a length of chain-link fence and let him leave. He took a deep breath and cast a last look over his shoulder at the dirty, drab compound. He caught sight of Blair running after him. She slipped through the fence just as it rolled closed.

“Marcus! Come back! It’s not safe out here,” she called.

“For you,” he retorted, turning and throwing his arms wide. “The Terminators don’t care about me. Whatever. I’m gone. Forget I exist. Leave me alone.”

He turned and continued his trek across bare, wasted dirt land. Tire ruts were the only evidence of a road, twisting this way and that among dead trees, rubble, and hollowed-out cars.

“Forget you exist? You saved my life.” Blair caught up to him and grabbed his upper arm. She pulled, but he kept walking.

“Blair, go back to whatever it is you do while you’re on the ground. I’m not made for the company of humans. I never was, and now it’s twice as true. John let me go, so it’s okay.” Marcus thought the words would reassure her, but she only gripped harder.

“No. I won’t.”

Marcus stopped and looked down into her flashing eyes. He paused, then shook her off. She tumbled into the dirt, little brown puffs rising around her as she stared resentfully up at him.

Marcus readjusted the pack on his shoulder. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t owe you anything.”

He walked away, and this time Blair didn’t follow.

* * *

Marcus had been walking for two days when he felt eyes on him. He’d been right about the Terminators ignoring him. He hadn’t actually seen any of them as he hiked east through craggy ravines and the ruins of small towns, but he knew they would have come if he’d been true flesh and blood. There were no survivors out here.

He paused on a weather-beaten boulder at the edge of a stream, as much to listen as to look into the dark treeline ahead. He blinked, realizing that these were the first live trees he’d seen since waking up in 2018. Scrawny and sparse, yes, but alive. Maybe it was their proximity to the stream. He jumped down from the boulder, boots splashing in the shallow water. Two more steps, and he froze. A tingle started at the base of his metal spine and traveled upward. There was definitely someone watching him. He disappeared swiftly into the brush, leaving no footprints on the rocky bank.

Marcus sought out a small clearing as soon as he noticed the shadows deepening. He didn’t have any food and his Terminator-derived power source maintained a constant body temperature, so he didn’t need fire. What his human brain did still need was sleep. Tonight, however, he didn’t plan on resting. He was setting a trap. 

He settled his bedroll at the base of the biggest tree he could find, unconcerned with nighttime predators. He’d encountered exactly one animal since leaving the Resistance camp, and found himself wondering whether Skynet’s hatred of humans extended beyond warm-blooded bipeds to all varieties of life except its own. More likely animals were the shameful collateral damage of a planet-obliterating war they had no part in. He laid down fully clothed, hands cradling his head, and stared at living, fluttering leaves attached to swaying branches until it became too dark to see.

Two hours after sunset, Marcus’s acute, machine-enhanced hearing caught the sound of careful footsteps stealing toward him. He kept still and waited, his breathing slow and even. The steps hesitated at the edge of the clearing. In the pitch black he rose and rushed the figure, tackling it around the middle. 

“Uuff!” came a quiet exclamation as he drove a yielding flesh-and-blood human down into damp leaves and rich-smelling earth. The person scrambled to grab something at their waist, but Marcus slapped the hands away and pressed his weight down, pinning his observer underneath him.

“Who are you?” he demanded, twisting the arms up overhead and gripping the person’s wrists with one hand.

He found his flashlight and turned it on. Blair squeezed her eyes closed with another wordless exclamation as the light struck her. Exasperated, Marcus let go and rolled off of her.

“I should have guessed,” he muttered as she sat up and brushed herself off.

“You hit like a truck,” she complained, pulling leaves out of her hair.

She held the leaves up to the light, almost reverently, before dropping them. “I haven’t been out this far on foot before. The trees are beautiful.”

“They’re stunted,” Marcus replied.

He stood and offered her a hand up. She took it warily and followed him back to the meager shelter of the tree. They both sat on the cold ground next to his bedroll and he turned off the light.

“What are you doing out here, Blair?” Marcus asked.

“John asked you to do something for him, didn’t he?” Blair replied, which was no answer at all.

“So what if he did? I’m not a part of the Resistance. As long as I’m not helping the machines, it’s none of your business what John did or didn’t ask me.”

Blair said nothing. Marcus leaned back, observing her profile just barely visible in the scant light of a new moon. He found he wasn’t angry or even irritated. Two days hadn’t been nearly long enough to start missing the human race, but if he was completely honest, he liked Blair. He had since their first meeting, with her stuck dangling from her parachute lines. She’d calmly asked him to cut her loose with her own knife and been unsurprised when he caught her hand rather than let her fall. She had mistaken him for someone good. Someone human. She still did. 

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” he asked curiously.

Blair tilted her head down, hiding her face in darkness. “You’re only too ready to give up on yourself. Why is that?”

It was Marcus’s turn to sit silently. Blair sighed.

“You saved my life. You saved John Connor’s life. Kyle and Star claim you saved them, too. If you have something to atone for, I’d say you’ve done it. Why are you punishing yourself?”

Marcus’s eyes felt hot as he replied, “You can’t atone for the dead. All you can do is join them. Unless you’re me.”

Blair groped blindly in the darkness. Marcus was still for a moment, then reached for her hand. It felt wiry and callused, not soft and feminine.

“Alright, pretend for a minute you do actually want to be alive. Don’t you want to do something good with your life?” she pressed.

“Do I get to pick what’s good, or does John Connor pick?”

He felt more than saw her grin. “I guess the whole messiah complex does grate a bit, doesn’t it? I’ll admit, a break from the adoring legion has helped me gain some perspective. That, and seeing the ground from a height of five feet instead of five thousand.” She took a deep breath. “What if I told you I volunteered to leave the compound? To work as a spy instead of a pilot?”

The hairs on the back of Marcus’s neck rose. “Did _John_ pressure you into that? Traveling outside the safe zones… it’s suicide, Blair. Why the hell would you do that?”

She fixed him with a hard stare. “John didn’t ask me to do anything. Like I said, I volunteered. And I happen to think it’s worth it, for the survival of the human race. _And_ I happen to think I have a better than average chance with the right partner.”

“The right partner, huh?” Marcus could almost laugh at the insanity of her optimism.

“Yeah. Someone who’s trustworthy. Someone who can handle himself. Someone who can hide from the machines - maybe even walk among them. Someone who’s already proven himself. So, you.” Blair said it like it was the most natural conclusion she could have drawn.

They sat in silence for a while, Blair having said her piece. Marcus could tell she wanted an answer, but she didn’t push him. In fact, spying out Skynet’s North American bases had been what John asked him to do. It was good work, Marcus reflected, realizing now that he’d rejected the man more than he’d rejected the mission. 

Blair claimed volunteering was her own idea, but Marcus could feel John Connor’s ruthless— and subtle— manipulation behind it. John knew his pilot. Her dogged determination, her cool head under pressure, and her optimism that refused to sink into jaded causticity. She’d probably suggested going after Marcus like it was her own idea, and John had been all too happy to let her. John would do anything to further the cause of the Resistance, except directly kill humans. And John knew him. He knew sending Blair after Marcus wasn’t a death sentence— far from it.

Finally Marcus shook his head with a rueful smile. “I’m not going to get rid of you, am I?”

“You should quit trying,” she agreed.

Marcus took a deep breath, held it for a beat, then let it all out in a whoosh. “Okay. Alright. I’ll do it. I’ll try, at least. Not for John the Messiah, though. For...for myself, maybe.”

A slow smile spread across Blair’s beautiful features. “That’s plenty good. We can go get my pack and get started in the morning.”

**Author's Note:**

> Terminator movie run down:
> 
> All Terminator films center around Artificial Intelligence and time travel. The continual backstory for each film is that in the near future, man creates AI, and when it gains awareness, it calculates that the greatest threat to its own existence is man. So it fires all the nukes in the world (an event called Judgement Day), kills most of the human race, and develops its own killing robots call Terminators to hunt down all human survivors. A man named John Connor brings the world’s survivors together as a Resistance army, and the AI (named Skynet) figures out time travel so it can send killers back in time to remove John Connor before he becomes a threat.  
> Movie 1: 1984: a woman named Sarah Connor is hunted by a Terminator from the future - a killing machine that looks like a man. Its only goal is to kill her. She is protected by a human soldier from the future named Kyle Reese. Kyle tells her she will be mother to John Connor, who saves the human race from the machines. Unknown to either of them, Kyle is John’s father. (It’s basically the most bittersweet sci-fi doomed romance ever made, I love it.)  
> Movie 2: 1995: John is 11, his mom is in an asylum because she’s pretty much a horrible mom for making him learn how to shoot guns and make explosives since he was a baby. A new Terminator comes to kill John. A less advanced, reprogrammed Terminator is also sent (by the John Connor of the future) to protect child-John. John, his mom, and the reprogrammed Terminator decide to take out Skynet before Judgement Day happens by destroying the company (Cyberdyne) that will create it, thereby preventing Judgement Day and saving the human race.  
> Movie 3: 2003 (or possibly 2005): John is a young adult and is all messed up from knowing that he and his mom averted the major event of his life - Judgement Day - and he’ll never be able to tell anyone. He is still haunted by the stories he was raised with; it won’t let him go. He runs into an old flame from middle school, Kate Brewster, whose father works at the Pentagon in AI. A Terminator arrives with the mission to kill Kate and a short list of John’s friends from middle school because they are his top lieutenants in the future war against the machines. Another less advanced and reprogrammed Terminator arrives to protect them - this one has been reprogrammed and sent by Kate Connor from the future. They discover and try to thwart the new Skynet AI being developed by the Pentagon, but fail. The Terminator succeeds in placing them in a government bunker, to survive as the bombs fall and the world ends.  
> Movie 4: (In the past: 2003): A death row inmate named Marcus Wright signs his body over to science before execution. 2018: He awakes in an underground facility in 2018, unaware of the Judgement Day that happened in 2003. He comes into contact with teenage Kyle Reese, who convinces him to leave the ruins of L.A. and help him find John Connor and the Resistance. John Connor is not the head of the Resistance, but a prominent soldier and his views on time travel and the machines are known, but mostly ignored by the top brass. John, his wife Kate, and their team discover that Marcus is not a human, but a cyborg - metal skeleton with human brain and heart, and two nervous systems. They believe he was built by Skynet as a new, experimental Terminator (and they aren’t wrong - the research that was done on his body after execution was taken over by Skynet for its own purposes). Marcus is shocked to find this out, though they believe he has infiltrated to kill them all. Blair Williams, a pilot who was saved by Marcus in a fight with some humans and believes he is not a Terminator, helps him escape. Marcus cuts a deal with John to save Kyle Reese and several other humans from Skynet central in San Francisco. They proceed to blow it up after rescuing the people, dealing a severe blow to Skynet but not stopping it. John is badly injured in the fight and in danger of dying from a wound to the heart. Marcus donates his heart to John as his second chance to do something right with his life.


End file.
